Taxonomy Of Workplace Relationships

One of the things that I found interesting starting my first real professional job, was trying to explain to my wife the relationships to between myself and my supervisors. For example:

My boss' boss' secretary told my boss that she couldn't do 'x', but my boss' boss' boss really didn't care. What makes it interesting is that my boss' boss' thought doing 'x' was a wonderful idea and started doing it herself.

All that redundancy makes it confusing for those trying to follow the story, and it gets to be quite a tongue-twister just saying it. So, I came up with the 'Taxonomy of Workplace Relationships' to describe who everyone is in an easy to understand manner. We are all familiar with family relationships, so my boss' boss is now called my grandboss, my boss' boss' boss is my great-grandboss. Well after a couple generations even this gets cumbersome to say, so it can be worked from the other side of the 'family tree'. So, because the CEO is sooooo far back, we just call him 'Adam'. From there we go to Adam's children, grandchildren, etc. Sure this is really Christian-Judeo centric, but it's something that even my Hindu and Buhdist coworkers understand.

So, let's go back to the example story and see if it's a bit easier to understand:

My grandboss' secretary told my boss that she couldn't do 'x', but my great-grandboss really didn't care. What makes it interesting is that my grandboss thought doing 'x' was a wonderful idea and started doing it herself.